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Gargouillou: A New Meaning to ‘Garden Variety’

A GARDEN GROWS A salad by the French chef Michel Bras inspired others. Credit
Palis-Trébosc

A FEW months ago, I was dazzled by Paul Liebrandt’s vibrant vegetable appetizer, From the Garden, at Corton in TriBeCa.

A mixture of vegetables, leaves, fruits and flowers, each prepared in a different way — from Thumbelina carrots cooked with saffron to oven-dried spinach — was set upon a “dirt” made from black brioche crumbs and powdered tomato. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen or tasted.

A few weeks ago, while at Manresa, David Kinch’s restaurant in Los Gatos, Calif., I enjoyed a vibrant vegetable appetizer called Into the Vegetable Garden. The mixture of vegetables, leaves and flowers, each prepared in a different way and set upon a black “dirt” of roasted chicory root and dried potatoes, was very much like something I’d seen and tasted. Deliciously so.

I asked Mr. Kinch how long he’d been serving it; he told me that it evolved over the last three years — since he began getting his vegetables from Love Apple Farm, the biodynamic spread near the restaurant.

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A dish by Paul Liebrandt at Corton. Credit
Melissa Hom

He wanted a dish to showcase the farm’s daily offerings, from roots to leaves. “It’s like holding a mirror up to the garden,” he said by phone. The cooked vegetables on the plate are individually braised; their juices combined to make the foamy emulsion that represents dew.

Mr. Kinch gives credit for his creation to Michel Bras, the chef in Laguiole, France, who has long served a dish whose ingredients reflect the land around the restaurant.

Gargouillou (pronounced gar-gu-YU) is the name of the dish, said Mr. Liebrandt, who also credited Mr. Bras. “He is the genius chef from Laguiole who took a simple vegetable composition and elevated it into something new, fresh and magical,” he wrote by e-mail.

Reached in Laguiole, where the restaurant that he runs with his son, Sébastien, is closed for the season, Mr. Bras said that the idea for the 50- to 60-ingredient dish — which changes daily based on what’s in the market and his home garden — came to him during a run in the countryside in June 1978, when the fields and mountains were in full flower. “It was beautiful, it was rich, it was marvelous,” he said. “I decided to try to translate the fields.”

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A dish by David Kinch at Manresa in Los Gatos, Calif.Credit
Justin Lewis

Gargouillou’s effect has been as prolific as it has been poetic. In 2007, on a posting on the Love Apple Farm’s blog, www.growbetterveggies.com, Mr. Kinch wrote, “This dish has had enormous influence on a whole generation of chefs around the world, many who took the idea and built their own theme into it.” For example, at Mugaritz, just outside San Sebastián, Spain, the chef Andoni Aduriz, “one of the world’s brilliant talents, has placed his own stamp on what has now become a signature dish at his restaurant worthy of his name,” Mr. Kinch wrote.

There are other Gargouillou gardeners in the United States, like Daniel Patterson at Coi in San Francisco, who serves Abstraction of Garden in Early Winter. And at a dinner set for Feb. 21 at the James Beard House in Manhattan, Dominique Crenn from Luce at the InterContinental San Francisco will serve Le Jardin de l’Hiver (Winter Vegetables with Black Olive Soil).

Mr. Bras is flattered by the homages. “I’m self-taught, so I’m very proud,” he said. Asked if an urban chef could make a true Gargouillou, he said with a laugh that a visit to the Union Square Greenmarket could yield “the world’s biggest.”

As for Mr. Kinch, he wrote in an e-mail message: “I think that it points out the evolution of how great ideas and concepts spread. It is wonderful.”